FALCON ON THE RISE FOR TWITTER LOVERS

Widgets are gaining a lot of importance with the rapid rise in the sale and purchase of smart phones all over the world. Their ease of operation is their key attracting feature. Falcon is an absolutely great home screen widget designed specifically for Twitter. This widget follows closely with the original Android design guidelines but still having its own unnique style. This widget is totally resizable and also offers a plethora of solid coloring choices and attractive layouts. Falcon still carries the beta tag, therefore Falcon is now free.

The Falcon has the full complement with all standard functions being available, which includes replying, and retweeting ( either native or quoted), favoriting, as well as sharing tweets using the inbuilt system-wide menu. The conversations are threaded, although the tweets present within the thread are not provided with in-line reply or retweet or the favorite controls, which becomes an issue at some point.

Falcon has the embedded browser which allows users the opportunity to quickly get and see the links in tweets and this comes without tapping anything but just the tweet. A person can launch the links out into the full browser by the tapping of the link itself, although it would really be helpful if it had a more visible and accessible icon somewhere around the Falcon’s embedded browser in order to do it because links within tweets usually are pretty small targets. On the down side, Falcon’s embedded browser could make use of a few extra tools, like the full-screen view as well as some standard navigation tools just in case a person wants to stay inside or within Falcon.

Although there is no support for any advanced stuff, like the options for search or the lists, Falcon doesn’t claim to be the one and only good Twitter client; but instead, tapping into the main icon does launch you to your default Twitter application for more and better involved social networking. It would have been nice to have the icon available everywhere its needed, so that one wouldn’t have the need to navigate from home screen view of the Twitter app just after finding something really interesting on Falcon.

Falcon provides an exciting as well as excellent Twitter experience right on the home screen along with giving smooth scrolling animation, and simple yet recognizable icons, with clean layout. All of the useful or important functions needed for a thrilling experience are large and are easily identifiable within a glance. There exist a few nuances in the area of navigation which might need a tad bit of getting used to. Like when holding down on Falcon widget for a very long time during scrolling through the Twitter feed will get it into a reposition mode. Again, the icon meant for switching between the timeline and the mention view was not entirely intuitive while using; the toggle-style icon that it incorporates is ambiguous in a way as to whether that indicates current view or a view which it allows the users to toggle into. A switch would have been clearer.